


Dream For Us

by darkhavens



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Dialogue-Only, Hannibal gives a villain's monologue, M/M, Monologue, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, immediately post-episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2016-01-26
Packaged: 2018-05-16 08:47:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5822113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkhavens/pseuds/darkhavens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Immediately post-fall, Will has not come around and Hannibal is starting to worry. He tries to talk Will into consciousness with a villain's monologue that morphs pretty quickly into more of a love letter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dream For Us

“Has it truly come to this? Have you finally succeeded in reducing me to that most dire of tropes, the villainous monologue, with your obstinate, continued silence? Very well. Where best to begin? That first moment I realised you were meant to be mine, perhaps, sitting there in Uncle Jack’s office in your cheap, shabby clothing, hideously ungroomed and unshaven, the very antithesis of everything I thought I might ever come to want, to need, to desire?

“I had already resigned myself to dealing with you in return for the opportunity to observe the FBI’s BAU in action - a most educational and advantageous happenstance, as I am sure you are aware - but then...then you looked at me, and I was lost.

“You made eye contact with me, Will - petulantly, almost; in brutal defiance of your baser instincts, to be sure - but, in that brief moment, I saw into the very depths of your soul, saw the endless possibilities of you - of _us_ \- in all their glorious, sanguine delights, and I finally learned what it was to yearn for something...achievable, instead of only that which has been forever lost.

“And, oh, my sweet William, had you not already taken possession of my heart, you would most assuredly have done so the instant I found you crouched on the floor of the Hobbs kitchen, your first kill at your feet, his blood dappling your skin with vermilion freckles as you fought to contain his daughter’s - _our_ daughter’s - own blood within her failing body.

“From that moment, our fates were truly sealed. I could no more have walked away from you, or let you walk away from me, than I could bring my darling Mischa back to life with the force of my desire. Everything I did, I did for you, my love, for us. Where once you shied away from contact, from kindness, from the force of your needs, from _your_ desires, the man before me now stands tall and firm and takes what he wants, indulges himself as he should, as he deserves.

“The time you spent in that cage was a necessary evil, for the both of us. For you to be stripped back to the bone, that those bare essentials could be tempered in fire; for you to be shown how very little Jack truly cared for the parts of you he could not use to his own advantage, how very little he trusted in the purest essence of you. For me, it was a...test, of my devotion. I had to see if my obsession with you would lessen once you were out of my immediate reach. A part of me, that part that Uncle Jack would have you believe is a monster in need of being put down...that part wanted to kill you for making me feel, for making me care as strongly as I do. As much as the rest of me loved you, that part of me hated you for changing my very reason for being. Killing you would have simplified my life, removed the immediate threat of discovery. It would have allowed me to continue indulging my dark desires, secure in the knowledge that Crawford and his crew were nothing more than insignificant insects, reduced to fluttering uselessly around my displays without your insights to guide them.

“And then you sent Matthew Brown to kill me, and that monstrous part of me discovered it could no more be parted from you than could the rest of me. Had I killed you when I first envisioned it, I would surely have destroyed myself in turn as I bled out my grief and rage and loss through countless profoundly malignant tableaux, calling down fire and brimstone on my head in self-castigation, scourging myself with Uncle Jack standing in for the knout.

“And then you came back to me, back to our talks, our dark waltz, no more able to resist the call of our union than was I. And you came with seduction in mind, my love, no matter that you believed Jack had been the one to plant those seeds. You nurtured them, fed them, watered them with Randall Tier’s blood, and, slowly but surely, you continued to become.

“I confess that keeping the knowledge of Abigail’s persistence in this world from you for so long was...a miscalculation on my part. But I was wholly taken with the idea of being able to present you with our teacup, reassembled and stronger than before, as my first gift to you in our new life together. I wilfully underestimated your ongoing ability to deny yourself that which you most desire. I wanted so badly to believe you would come to me, come _with_ me, even knowing that Jack was sitting on your shoulder like a fork-tongued angel, dripping poison into your ear at every opportunity.

“I regret the destruction of our reconstructed teacup; but I wanted to hurt you as you had hurt me, tearing chunks from your still beating heart with my bare hands, as you had mine. And then I whiled away my time in Florence, waiting for you to find me. Bedelia was quite sick of hearing your name by the end of that first week. By the end of that month, she was beginning to lay the bedrock of her defence and, not coincidentally, scatter the first clues to my eventual undoing.

“Your forgiveness, whispered into the darkness of the catacombs beneath the chapel, bouncing back from the cold stone walls, its echoes wrapping around the skulls and bones of so many dead, was like a balm upon my soul. I came within inches of touching you then, of reaching out and _taking_ you, but knew that, were I to actually lay hands on you in that moment, I should never let you go again, and neither of us were yet ready for that.

“I let you chase me til I caught you, Will, and you did the same. We are alike, even as our differences complement each other. The three years I waited for you only served to feed my hunger, as your time with your make-believe family only helped serve to feed your own.

“You were almost feral by the time you came to me, gloriously vicious, and viciously glorious. You knowingly offered up a host of Jack’s minions as sacrifices to the Dragon in your bid to free me, even as you told yourself you were doing it to take us _all_ down.

“You said it was beautiful, Will, as you embraced me, embraced all that I am, and then you slipped us both from Jack’s grasp with poetic finality. You belong to me now, as I do to you, but you have to wake, Will. Your heart is beating still, and you are breathing once more. Everything else can be patched and mended; neither of us broken too badly, either in our defeat of the Great Red Dragon or as a result of our wingless flight to freedom. You just have to open your eyes and see…

“Will?

“Ah, Will, there you are. Back with me at last, and both pupils equal and reactive, to my utmost relief. I almost find myself wanting to thank God for the first time in living memory. Almost. What say we dedicate our next kill to him? I’m sure he’d appreciate the humor of it. But first, we have plans to make and places to be. There is so much of this world I want to show you, my darling boy; so much you have yet to show me.

“No, stay still, don’t try to talk, you’ll pull your stitches and the anaesthetic hasn’t yet worn off. Just catch your breath and let the knowledge, the acceptance of our joint survival sink in and take hold. We have all the time in the world now to play, and all the world as our playground. It has never before been home to anything anywhere nearly as magnificent as us; it has not awe enough to encompass all that we shall be and do.

“Rest now, Will, and dream our new beast into being, one that can swallow whole cities down and suck the very marrow from their bones before spitting them out and moving on to the next.

“Dream for us, Will, and wake to find our dreams reality.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written for this fic-promptly prompt: [Any, Any, Self-aware villain monologues](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/324763.html?thread=11489947#cmt11489947).


End file.
